Patrick Campbell Bootstrapped ProfitWell to a $200M Exit, Here's How...

0:00I think what we did right in profitwell is we were really good at thinking and I know that sounds weird like everyone here is good at thinking but if I had to kind of contextualize everything down we were really really good at thinking through how we thought versus what we thought and when I look at companies that are really successful whether they're like bootstrapped funded anything in between I think this is fundamentally the thing that separates the companies that do really really well for whatever your definition of well is versus the companies that kind of just are stagnant or maybe you know pass away as companies

0:40and so this is the concept that I really really want to unpack today to kind of really bring this home to hopefully everyone in the room here everyone here has some sort of mission right some of you are trying to like save the world you have more of like a social impact company some of you are trying to disrupt a particular industry and Conquer All who kind of face you and then there's some of you most of you you just want a really great life for your team your company your family if you're solo but what's really interesting is you kind of like face that Journey with

1:09this like Lookout World here I come I'm gonna you know Roar and be really really successful and everything's going to be amazing and then what the world does is it responds with what I like to call the Trinity of fu and that Trinity is a monkey and the first part of the Trinity or the first pillar is basically the market okay the Market's like hey you know that like cute app that you thought of at microconf and one of the like sessions that cute app is now facing a market that has 16x number of competitors you know CAC is up 130 percent 220 percent of your sales and marketing software

1:49over the past 10 years you know and just to like throw insult to injury you want to hire in your bootstrapped well team tenure is down 30 over the past five years and team is really really expensive so the Market's just like yeah nice like it's a really little cute Security app you got there like good luck right don't worry it gets worse so the second pillar of the Trinity of fu is Tech AI that's the slide are we dead are we all gods now are we obsolete nobody knows um but AI obviously huge huge shift in our markets but there's a bunch of little Tech things that have always come

2:34into different markets that have taken that really cool premium feature you have and all of a sudden makes it into a commodity overnight and all kinds of things in between and then my last and really favorite pillar of the Trinity um is the personal pillar right some of you live with monsters children right some of you are going to get sick some of you are going to have family members that get sick or my personal favorite part of this pillar some of you have parents where even after you have a life-changing exit still want you to go become a doctor for some reason that actually happened in the past year

3:14um the point is is that you have all of this working against you right all of this stuff is like hey I love your Market I love what you're going after but this is the stuff that really really is going to make your life hard and then unfortunately our response historically is oh my God I found this thing on a podcast let's implement this thing it's going to be awesome right or hey you know chamoth he said that thing on the all in podcast that's really relevant to my one person startup right and then my other favorite here is like you know I'm taking a cold plunger like

3:52what's your morning routine I've never been asked more in my life the past year what the [ __ ] my morning routine is okay I wake up at 4am I get a coffee and I go to my computer that's it okay and it's not that these things aren't important right I don't want to trivialize it I learned so much from talks and podcasts and videos the morning routine that you need is so important to you but all of these things that we kind of talk about in the context of the Trinity of Fu are all the what right when I talk about the how the how really comes down to how you

4:25filter those ideas and again when I look at the companies that do really really well versus the companies that haven't done so well it's typically leadership that is either really really good at filtering the what with the how or those companies that are just so enamored to reacting constantly to the one and so I want to spend the next 30 minutes or so basically walking through um how we thought about building some things out first thing and this one's going to hurt a little bit it's really simple but it's gonna hurt because some of you are going to want to like break up with your girlfriends or

5:01boyfriends after you hear this and that's kind of the intention all right what a preview right exciting preview okay and that's the journey framework and the real question that this really comes down to is are you and your business partners but even like your life partners are you all on board with the destination you're going to and the nature of that particular destination this is the first question that's super super super super important and the reason that this comes to be is that when you think about making a decision of what you're going to do with your life especially here with you know honestly we all have it pretty good

5:36right like we're not digging ditches we get to choose what type of app we're going to build all of us can put up landing pages and you know actually can make money it might not be as much money as we want but it's really really easy to get started here right and so you have the choice the privilege to choose your destination right and along with that destination no matter how you're going to go about it there is a nature of destination or nature of that Journey for that destination that aligns to it here's what I mean by that there's really only three paths and some

6:08of you are going to push back on this but we'll get to why I really only think there are three paths the first path that you have is a low payoff path this is not a bad path this is a path where you can go and you can create the equivalent of a corner store or a series of corner stores 10 years ago and you can create a really really great business where your family is doing phenomenal and the journey of that path is awesome the Journey of that path can be pretty leisurely it can just be you you don't have to raise money this is the beauty of the internet right

6:41the next PATH is this medium payoff path this is a path where you want that you know want for nothing type lifestyle which means you're probably going to have to work really really hard at first a lot of hours at first and then those hours can slowly go to zero this is the path that is really really common at microconf you might have to raise a little bit of money from Tiny Seed I'm not an LP yet but I'm still a fan just to be clear but it's one of those paths that's really really common and then there's the like big payoff want to make a dent

7:11in the universe type path that you're going after and that particular path in terms of the journey is really freaking hard now when you choose your particular path It Is by no means a guarantee of that success and that you're going to get there but the reason I bring this up and when I talk to a lot of Founders this is one of the first questions I ask especially if they're having any like should I keep going type questions is because you need to make sure that you're aligned to where you're trying to go with how you're going to get there now the issue a lot of people have with

7:44these three paths is they go well you know there was this company they had like 20 hours per week and that 20 hours per week they got all of a sudden this like really really big exit right well there's always exceptions to the rule but if you look at most companies the ones that are going after a big payoff need to be really really hard charging get the heck out of my way in terms of their tenor and the ones that want a really good lifestyle they shouldn't be working life in limb every single week in order to get that particular lifestyle and so it's really really important that

8:18you align and if you're on the left side here that's fantastic but then make sure you're not working 70 hours a week if you're on the right side you're probably gonna have to raise money this is one of the biggest problems with profitwell we look at you know externally like oh this was a big success and I'm not complaining but when we actually look at we wanted to go after this big payoff path we didn't do the things that we were supposed to we should have raised money we should have went for it in terms of what we were trying to do because we kept talking a game of going after that big

8:48payoff but we made mistakes by not making those decisions so the journey and the destination and how you're going to get there are incredibly important to align on and when I think of my issues with part-time co-founders in the beginning which was an absolute disaster this was the thing that would have helped me if I said hey where are we going you guys went over here I want over here this isn't going to work out make sense all right next up all right so we have a journey what do we do on that Journey right how do we actually operate in terms of building our company

9:27the framework that I found really really helpful is a framework that helps you focus like are we actually focused on the right things at the right time and this is useful whether again you're a solopreneur and trying to build something out or you're trying to go after that really really big path over time because no matter what your goal was again great life trying to change the world trying to disrupt a particular industry there's a bunch of different things that push you forward on that particular path or hold you back on that path right headwinds Tailwinds every other metaphor you've seen on Twitter we could name many many of them right well

10:02the thing that push you forward not to be so obvious is growth right and the things that hold you back typically are around operations even if you have the most efficient operating business in the world it's not going to be zero or less than zero right it's one of those things that's still going to hold you back a little bit and so the way I like to think about any planning cycle not only a profitwell but now a paddle is when we're putting together an initiative is that initiative pushing things forward or is it something that all of a sudden is going to hold us back or are we

10:29cleaning up something that's holding us back and if you start to atomize this down you start to realize there's a bunch of different things underneath these particular curves right all of a sudden under the growth path we have obviously acquiring customers we have monetizing them and we have expanding revenue on those customers and under this operations path all of a sudden we have Finance billing operations all of these different things and product is a backdrop because product drives everything right and we can atomize this further into every little thing that basically goes into each of these two curves right and so when we go through our planning

11:01cycles and we did this prior to paddle and we're doing it a paddle right now we basically look at these two curves and we decide what season are we in for whatever we're trying to do and obviously for like you know an IPO path type company there's a lot of different resources that we have but even when you know bootstrap profitwell we're able to really prioritize by measuring as much as we can even if it was just logical measurement of like what's going to have the most impact right and so it helps you understand exactly where things are going and then obviously the whole vision is to not

11:34only push that growth forward but also make sure that those operations pieces become not liabilities but actually things that are assets now to kind of operationalize this a little bit further I can share this in depth I'm not going to go through it right now we actually use a really lightweight planning cycle every team has their own type of planning right so product uses more traditional okrs marketing uses kind of a hybrid but at a company level with this thing called paddle Compass basically what it is is three to nine initiatives over a six month period that we're basically hard charging that have measurable outcomes all the really traditional goal setting

12:10type stuff we make sure that it really supports that strategic Vision in some particular way on the slide that I showed you before this is the way to kind of like think about things it's like nicely elegant design and then the most important part particularly those of you who have teams this is way overboard but just making sure that obviously The Branding of those initiatives goes throughout the company so if you're a five-person team you might have one initiative two initiatives for the next six months but The Branding is one of the things that really unlocked this internally because all of a sudden The Branding is what

12:42people latch onto come up with cute names you want something that people are willing to print a t-shirt over in my opinion because that really really resonates with everyone and allows the team to be really aligned make sense the joke stopped just so you know that was intentional I got to be serious Patrick now okay all right people in alignment and I promise we'll get the pricing that's the thing that everyone cares about so people in alignment um how many of you here have at least one team member even if they're a contractor okay cool anyone here have like 10 or more people that they work with

13:17contractors okay amazing once you start getting more and more kind of nodes within your company Things become much much more complex right which is probably the most obvious statement that I could have made here right but the funny thing is is that a lot of us don't spend enough time making sure that that team is as aligned as much as possible now some ways you can do that is through planning Cycles like we just talked about but I think the thing that a lot of us don't realize is that alignment not only with where we're going but even just the strategy of how we're going to get there is one of those

13:48things you have to repeat over and over and over again and we as Leaders especially as Founders like I was this guy and I still kind of am this guy we kind of go well I [ __ ] said it at all hands right like why don't they get it right and it's like I said it again why are they asking these questions and it's like because they're humans right and you're not perfect in how you communicate and therefore when you say hey we're gonna go climb this particular Hill it's one of those things where they're like they're not necessarily resonating with it because they didn't

14:16even know there was a hill to begin with and you sat with that information for so long and to kind of like bring this home a little bit before we get to the framework I think again all of you have this mission and you're expecting every single person you hire and you talk to to be kind of in this perfect alignment right and you'll occasionally have these people who just aren't aligned at all and you're like yeah I'll just fire those folks right the problem is is that this particular vision of how a company continues to build with people just isn't the case right in reality

14:46everything looks like this because everyone's got their own idea of what you mean everyone's just going after like well I thought this was the best idea or I don't respect that person or all kinds of different things like more people more problems right but the funny thing is is like you want to be able to move everyone directionally in the same kind of process and where they're particularly going so this is the framework I found really really helpful even if it's just two of you I think this is amazingly helpful to figure out like where the heck you're going even if you're solo I think it

15:17really helps introspectively get your thoughts all in order and the first piece is what the heck are you doing like where are you going and this is deceptively simple right for profitwell and then paddle our whole thing that we came up with is we want to grow and run subscription companies automatically and that automatic word was something that we fought over for a lot because automatic means like truly automatic not like you get a wizzy wig editor and all this other stuff as a customer but it's like no you just plug it in and it does its job and then the next thing that we identified which was really really

15:51critical for us was this concept of a mission metric and a mission metric is just are we directionally moving where we want to go at this particular Mission so for us the mission metric was basically how much revenue was on profit level so how much billions of dollars was flowing through that system because theoretically we're doing really really good at acquiring users and customers then and also we're doing our job by like growing these companies automatically if that number's going up and just with these two particular pieces we repeated this over and over and over again it was one of those things that was the first slide of every

16:26internal deck the first slide of every All Hands it was one of those things we wanted to make sure that people were annoyed by it that's how much we talked about it right and then the next step down was really making sure like what are the guiding principles of how we're going to get there so for us it was this whole concept of do it for you so not only in terms of product but customer success even sales doesn't matter when it was just one person on a sales team Etc it was like we're gonna do it for you that's our company ethos and another piece was be the most

16:55helpful brand in SAS anyone here see profitable or Price intelligently content before we publish a ton of content I'll talk a little bit about that in a second but the idea was is when people are making a decision it's like are they going in this particular direction is the decision guiding Us in this particular light and then as we develop different teams each team was required to put together essentially a memo which was a plan on how they were going to fit into that particular mission so for our marketing team it was very much in terms of this recur media concept where we had eight different

17:28podcasts and video series and all that kind of fun stuff to kind of educate the market and most importantly where I find most people miss out in terms of management of like leaders that they're trying to bring in is the tempo and the tempo is basically how much of whatever you're claiming you're going to do are you actually going to do in a given period most of the time when you're trying to hire someone to lead marketing or lead product this is where the misalignment ends up happening like everyone buys into the upper part because normally it's a little bit higher level so people can get on board with it and then all of

18:01a sudden they're like yeah this is how we're going to get there but you as a leader who doesn't necessarily have marketing expertise you're like I don't know why it's not working or I just feel like there's this resentment that's building up and most of the time it's because you haven't agreed on like how much that person's actually going to ship or what good actually looks like for that particular organization and so this framework was really really helpful in aligning the team as much as humanly possible make sense all right you want more tactical stuff to like make money and stuff is that you want that more everyone when I started

18:32profit well I'm first time founder like I never I also not entrepreneurial like I wasn't the kid like hustling in college in high school I was gonna go save the world again Dad wanted me to be a doctor I was like I hate blood it's terrible um and so what I ended up doing is I went and I uh was like I'm going to be a lawyer and then I was like that's dumb so I went and worked for the government for a while um and when I found it give you that context because when I founded profilewell everyone and this is the advice we all share

19:00people are really important culture is really important I thought that was the biggest crock of [ __ ] ever I was like it's going to be the product that fails it's going to be our marketing that fails right all of this stuff why does it matter and it really matters because as soon as you have five people everything becomes a lot more complex than you think it is and yeah you can get on the phone and you can hop on a call but like this is so much easier just to repeat this and then your managers start repeating this and it depends on how big you want to get it's one of those things

19:28that can align as much as possible but we'll talk about making money because that's what everyone wants to talk about all right Demand yet who here has sales on their team who here has marketing on their team everyone should be raising their hands it's insane like let's not get into the meme of like dual product build marketing um the answer is both just to be surprised the thing with demand gen what I struggled with so much and demand gen my definition is like how do you move people to buy your product that's really really basic I think we over complicate this a lot and so this framework that we've kind of

20:01developed this whole concept of like rivers and pools and to give you a little bit of context if you're not really sure what's going on with sales and marketing you have this like timeline right on the right side you have someone converting either through self-serve or through a sales process and then on the left side are people who have like not even thought about the problem that you're trying to solve and there's a bunch of different things between those two periods that you can use to go after that person right as you get closer to a point of conversion people are like asking for demos right all the way in the far left

20:32you have CEOs that they they want to grow and your B2B product can help them grow but again they haven't like heard of you nor have they actually thought about the way to grow that you actually solve and the reason that this is really really crucial is most of the tactics that you look at which are really really important because they're the core of demand gen are what I like to call the river so these are the things like cold email a little bit of inbound marketing advertising influencer marketing social media these are all the things that move people from a place of not hearing about

21:02you or kind of being aware of you to getting on that demo or going into a self-serve trial or whatever ends up happening so you need to constantly make sure that river is moving and all the tactics that you read are like how do we widen that River how do we move that River more quickly and if you kind of think about it this is where the funnel comes from right so the funnel is like haven't really heard of you to hearing about you raising their hand in some particular way and then closing them in terms of sales or some sort of self-serve flow now what's really kind of interesting

21:31though is that most money and most kind of time and effort is spent on the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel the issue is is that all data I don't have time to go deep into this data indicates that's diminishing and effectiveness so sales folks are more expensive sales is getting harder and harder all those customer acquisition cost numbers I talked about in the beginning those are all going up it's because we used to have a bunch of different marketing channels that were opening up every single quarter like I'm sure some of you bought Google AdWords at a penny a click I'm sure some of you were the first

22:04folks on Facebook those were the days everything was amazing right now it's like [ __ ] you know that was just like one of those things where it's really really hard to acquire those customers and so you do really really need that River the thing that we did really really well at profitable and looking at the data and obviously we had access to a lot of this data was what if we made this part of the funnel bigger because most inbound marketing all it is is going to provide some sort of signal from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel like hey they raised their

22:33hand they downloaded an ebook right that's all it really is but because buying now especially in the software space but really in all spaces is so much more on the onus of the customer coming to you that timing might not be right so I want to build as much of a pool as possible inside this particular middle of the funnel so that when the timing comes I'm the first person they think of for that particular problem or one of my nudges gets them to kind of convert into a demo or a self-serve flow and so the two ways that we really went after this one was freemium which I know

23:06some of you are like oh freemium you're the product if it's freemium like it's not 2007 anymore that's not how freemium works okay freemium is one of the most I was so anti-freemium 10 years ago too freemium is one of the most beautiful things that like we have in our industry because think about it this way what better content do you have than your product there is no better content that you have and that's what freemium is freemium is part of acquisition it's not part of your pricing and so building out some sort of freemium and there's a bunch of ways to do it I wrote a book on freemium if

23:38anyone wants to take a look out of it but building up that freemium base builds that pool and then I own the right every single month to nurture that particular lead because they're hopefully using that product in some particular way and freemium if you want to know if you're being successful or not it's not looking at 14 30 day conversion it's looking at a cohort over six months of who is converted when they started frame you that's how you should be focusing on freemium big questions though do you know how to convert leads to customers and is that river flowing fast enough if the answer to those questions is no don't focus on

24:13freemium don't focus on the middle of the funnel you got to build that River up first there's a big mistake a lot of companies make they get really excited to give away a freemium product that's freemium out there it starts unless you have a top 50 growth person on your team which if you have to ask you don't ourselves included we didn't have a top 50 growth person but the best folks normally it's about two years into their life cycle when they know the answers to these particular questions make sense all right one more pool I alluded to this before um we started this thing called recur

24:47which was basically our equivalent of like Netflix and we did this when everyone said we were idiots and they were stupid and especially because we were bootstrapped and basically what this was is eight different video and uh podcast series that we had and the reason that we did this was again because we didn't want to just have this signal like we were doing ebooks and blog posts and all this other stuff and that was just a signal for our sales team we wanted to build that particular pool and what you're doing with shows podcast video series Etc is You're Building audience that's the distinction you're building that audience in that pool up

25:20so that you can Harvest that audience over time so we had a video series it's still out it's called pricing page teardown I collect data and I just tear down pricing pages I get 75 000 views per episode and it's not Mr Beast numbers but 75 000 people to look at B2B pricing page content is insane if you really think about it right That's The Power of what you're trying to do so what I recommend is if you're trying to build a pool I would start a podcast just start interviewing leads and customers like that's the easiest way to start you don't have to do video

25:54you don't have to think about how you look or anything like that really really easy you want to go a little bit more advanced if you want to like ball out like Arvid does with this whole studio and everything which I'm somewhat jealous and trying to compete with him on um then you can turn each blog post into a video that's the other way to start that's how we started we just started turning our blog post to videos engagement went through the roof now again virality is not what you're going for the thing I like to tell people is imagine you're at a webinar that had 500 people on it every single

26:24week you would be ecstatic by those numbers right if you have a podcast that has a few hundred people of your right Target customer every single week that's really really really powerful make sense let's talk about retention quick um I don't want to offend anybody but this is the crowd I'm always nervous talking about retention because the response I get well if the product was valuable enough people would stick around right and you're not wrong the problem is is that value is not binary so the way that we started thinking about retention and we built a bunch of products to help with retention so we really were able to get down and dirty

27:03with this is that you obviously have the Spectrum right now one side you have people who are huge Advocates they love you the other side you have your critics when we talk about retention as a community most of the time we talk about what I like to call Strategic retention what's the next feature what's the right segment that we should be targeting what is the right messaging that we should be going after onboarding all of these really really important things but we miss out because of that conversation this middle section which I like to call tactical retention and that's basically all the little nudges that you can do to move someone from

27:36Recently canceling to not or thinking about canceling to not and when we break down the data it depends on the vertical you're in your strategic retentions the majority of your retention problem don't worry but that tactical retention is about 25 to 40 percent of the problem which is a significant chunk that if you can solve post product Market fit everyone gets excited and so a couple of different things to optimize one term length so getting monthly customers onto quarterlies or annuals I would go for annuals as much as possible lifetime value is two to eight hundred percent higher and the only thing you have to do is you just

28:11got to ask people beyond the sign up most of us the only time we ask someone for an annual upgrade is when they're basically signing up best thing to do is every 60 to 90 days just go out to that customer base and just say hey you can get this in the slides like by the way we have this annual plan we'll give you two free months one free month it doesn't even have to be that big of a discount all of a sudden you get a lot of those folks basically coming on board another kind of controversial topic for this room cancellation flows we have this weird

28:39conception that when someone breathes on our cancel button that we should just like delete their data say oh I'm gonna go so sorry like refund them everything the opposite is also not true you shouldn't hold them hostage but what we found in looking at about two to three million different flows of people canceling you have about 18 to 30 seconds before people start to get aggravated and what you should do is ask them two questions first question is the obvious one why are you leaving don't do open response just make it multiple choice you'll get better data second question is the counter-intuitive one what did you like about the product and the

29:13reason you ask this question is because they're on a freight train to cancel and when they're on a freight train to cancel all of a sudden they're sitting there and they're like I hate this product right now they're probably not that intense but they're just like I'm leaving but when you ask them what they liked about it you're stopping that freight train and allowing them to actually have a moment to think about what they actually liked and with these two questions you can then Prime them for a salvage offer pause offer a bunch of different things one of my favorites is a maintenance plan hey we'll save

29:40your data we'll save your customizations it's only like 10 of the list price of the regular plan it's one of those things in B2B SAS people aren't using enough you can lower cancellations by 10 to 25 that's significant with two questions it's not intrusive gives you a lot of data for your product team or you as a product leader but it's one of those things that's really really high impact and then payment failures I'm not going to spend a ton of time here but 20 to 40 percent of all lost customers are typically because of credit cards credit cards 130 reasons why they fail most folks can double their recovery

30:16rates there's a bunch of different things you can do I would just suggest treating this segment of your customer base like a marketing channel plain text emails making sure they don't have to log in to update their payment information it's a lot of little things you can do there but it's something to look at all right last but not least pricing who here loves pricing there we go those are my people all right pricing isn't as complicated as a lot of people make it okay every business in here doesn't matter what you're selling who you're selling to what stage you're at you've created some sort of value and

30:50because we don't trade goat for wheat in the economies we play in you're basically saying this value is worth this much right and then everything in your business doesn't matter what it is your sales team your product team your operations team just you again for some of you is used to drive someone to that point of conversion or to justify the price or the product that you're offering them right so there's a bunch of different levers that you have here you have who you sell to you have what you include in that product you have the unbundling of that product there's a bunch of different things that you have

31:23but it all comes down to your buyers I know you've all heard buyer personas you should have buyer personas and then only one in five companies actually have some tangible buyer personas within their their actual company and I'm telling you this is the thing that separates people who are growing and people who are not because if you understand that buyer not only does everything else get easier but your pricing gets easier as well here's a framework that I can share it's just a Google spreadsheet it's not super complicated you can make it very complicated if you want but I'll send this out fill it out individually review it as an exec team

31:57or just two co-founders whatever it is and I just ask you to debate something because as soon as soon as you start debating it you're just going to discover something where you disagree and then the answer is let's go get some data and the way this helps with pricing is because all pricing especially in this room starts out like this we got one plan Jason free did a podcast and he said one plan right even though 99 of his traffic is direct which makes life a lot easier but it starts out like this I'm telling you Simplicity with pricing does not mean just having one tier okay we can make it

32:36more complicated because again you discover hey we have multiple different types of customers right so then you go hey I read that Harvard Business review article I'm very fancy let's do good better best right this is where good better best kind of comes from or it's like we're a little expensive for some we're a little cheap for others let's like even it out and then you sit there and you're like oh wait but Walmart came in right we need an Enterprise plan right contact us right and that's great that's awesome that's what you should do and then you get a little more educated get a little

33:06more sophisticated and you're like now we're gonna put the actual tiers differentiated how they should be and we're gonna know because we did our buyer Persona homework this tier is for this type of customer this tiers for this type of customer and so on and so forth and then the next part of the pricing journey is going to be huh we have more than four types of customers so then you're gonna have Shadow tears this is a hack that a lot of people don't talk about the fastest growing SAS companies have over 15 different tiers you as a customer will never see or should never see more than two or three but based on

33:41your engagement based on your data all of a sudden you get upgrade paths to these shadow tiers right is really really powerful and then all of a sudden you'll get a little more sophisticated and you'll do a pricing metric right this is the biggest hack some sort of scaling metric it's one of the most powerful things you could do if you don't have this drop everything and figure out what that metric is for user per thousand videos per 500 what's it doesn't really matter what it is I mean it matters for your company but you should have something okay not gonna be able to go deep into

34:10how to do this but it's in the slides if you want to and then all of a sudden you discover oh add-ons one of the most underutilized aspects of all pricing these are features that you've bundled because you were like it didn't take that long to build or you're like oh we should throw it in because it's going to help with retention even though you have no data to support that and then you're like oh less than 40 percent of people are using this that's a good sign anything that's utilized less than 40 percent probably a good candidate to pull out and actually charge for now some

34:39Integrations probably not but a lot of cases if you want to pull that out and actually charge for it and people are more than willing to pay for it customers with at least one add-on typically have about 20 to 50 percent higher lifetime value not only are they paying you more but they're typically retained at a much much higher rate and the final piece like God mode which you can start with if you want you start to have localization where you're like oh this country's willingness to pay is different than this country let's you know spread out and make sure we're pricing based on those different willingnesses to pay

35:07but that's where the things that get really really powerful last thing here because I want to make sure there's some time for questions um there's a email in here that not everyone should steal but you can steal the template this is how to raise your prices I've gone through so many pricing changes this is how to do it biggest thing it's not about you it's about them you're using what's called a Legacy discount and then actually pulling in data to remind them of how much value you've created if you use this verbatim it will be forwarded to me okay just don't do that T-Mobile used this recently which kind

35:43of aggravated me because I didn't get a cut but it was one of those things that like it's a really really powerful email that I've seen work really well most important part is this PS if this materially impacts you or your business depending on if your consumer B2B contact system and let us know one it's for the people are actually affected two it's for all the folks in this room we don't want to pay more so even if we believe you and your the value is there when I see this I'm going to go I'm not going to cause trouble I'll give you a six on my next MPS survey but whatever

36:09right really really powerful biggest thing your job is to cuddle with the chaos okay like it's chaotic you choose low outcome medium outcome big outcome for whatever destination you're going to go for it still is hard all of it is hard right but that's ultimately your job I'm happy to answer any questions and paticus on Twitter PC hepaticus if you want to jam on anything but thanks for having me appreciate it [Applause]